with him, a strip of four photographs of herself froma supermarket booth; she smiled in one, frowned in another, pulled a solemn face in a third, and stuck her tongue out in the last. She'd stayed the night. They'd both been half awake, half asleep, after The alarm had gone off; he'd have forgotten the strip ol pictures if she hadn't pointed to them, and they were in his wallet against his backside. She hadn't cried as he'd left but she might have done when he'd closed the front door and run to the mini-cab in the street.
'That's her – the lady's privilege, tardiness…'
Gough's voice dropped. 'I want his head. I want the blood running on the plate, like it's gravy… but legal. Don't dare forget that.'
Following Gough's eyeline, Joey saw her. He'd expected one of the style of women he worked with in the Custom House. The style was flat shoes, square hips, small chests, chucked-back shoulders, no makeup, bobbed hair. He'd said to Jen often enough – and it mattered nothing to him – that femininity in the Church was the endangered species. They swore with the men, drank with the men, had failed marriages with the men, and pissed in the bucket with the men when they were cooped up in the vans on surveillance. He was staring because it was not what he had expected or was used to. She looked like Kensington or Knightsbridge woman. She was looking around her as she headed for the check-in of Croatian Airways. As she wafted into the queue, Gough removed the pipestem from his mouth and advanced on her. Joey trailed after him.
He heard Gough say, 'You're Miss Bolton? Good to meet you. I'm Gough, glad you made i t… '
Joey reckoned that lateness, in Gough's book, was a cardinal, capital offence. It was a sparsely veiled rebuff, and she ignored it.
Her accent was class. 'No point hanging around this bloody shed. Yes, I'm Maggie Bolton. Who's he?'
She jerked with her thumb towards Joey. He didn't wait for Gough. He said, 'I'm Joey Cann. We're travelling together.'
'With the kindergarten, am I? Not to worry, I expect we'll manage.'
The queue moved forward. Joey, feeling himself the hired hand, reached to push forward the heavy metal- sided case that she had brought along with a lightweight one.
'Don't touch it,' she said sharply. 'I'm quite capable.
Touch it and I'll kick you, bloody hard.'
She heaved the heavy case forward, then delicately toed the lighter one up against the check-in conveyor.
She told the girl, as an instruction, not for debate, that the heavy case would be going in the cabin with her, and slapped her ticket down on the counter with her passport. She had the weary look of a frequent traveller, as if life was a chore. He wondered how her job description was listed in the passport. There was stamping and the tearing out of the ticket's flimsies, and she was given her boarding card.
'Come on, then,' she said. 'Let's go.'
She'd been very pretty, as she'd approached them, small, elegant and finely made, like a detailed little figurine. Close-up, leaving the check-in, Joey saw the depth of her makeup. Her alarm must have gone an age before his because her face was a minor work of art. She might have been ten years older than him, but he couldn't have said so because the makeup blanked out crow's feet and mouth lines. Her hair, gathered into a short ponytail, was soft gold, but he didn't know whether it was real or from a bottle. She wore a loud blue-green blouse, silk, and a dark skirt suit with a knee showing above neat ankles and lightweight half-height shoes. There was an old necklace, supporting a gold pendant, at her throat, and her fingers flashed small diamonds, but no wedding- ring.
He'd been told she was a technician, expert, and had not expected a businesswoman. She lugged her bags towards the departure doors, not hurrying as the third and final flight call was made. She stopped, turned.
'Right, Mr Gough, now don't worry yourself. I'll look after him, make sure he changes his socks, and bring him back safely. 'Bye – oh, how's Porky?'
'I don't think,' Gough answered stiffly, 'I know anyone of that name.'
'I thought you worked for him. Your boss, isn't he?
Porky Cork – Dennis Cork. He wasn't going anywhere with us so he transferred to run your crowd.
How is he?'
Gough growled, 'He's well. He's happy in his work because he is now doing a job that is worthwhile. The job is worthwhile because it affects people's lives.'
' 'Bye, Mr Gough,' and she was moving.
They went through the gate. He saw the passport as it was opened and handed over for cursory examination. She was a personal assistant.
They walked towards the plane's pier. She was struggling with the metal-sided bag but Joey was damned if he was going to offer help; there was a small sweat rivulet on her brow about to carve a little canyon through the blanket of makeup. On the pier, at the aircraft door, she slipped the bag down and flexed her fingers.
Joey said, 'Why were you so rude, Miss Bolton, about me, and to Mr Gough?'
'Call me Maggie – it's not the sort of work I'm used to, and you're not the sort of people I'm used to working with, and it's hardly a target that excites me.'
He had overseen the burning of his clothes, and those of the Cards who had held the man down, in a metalworker's coke oven. Then he had gone home.
Mister showered.
He was a long time under the scalding spray and he used a heavy soap to wash every inch of his skin, and every orifice of his body.
He sang quietly to himself in the bathroom. He felt elation. The Princess had been asleep when he'd come home, and would still be sleeping when he went out again. The exhilaration coursed in him, powered by the water's heat, and the days ahead would challenge him. It was what he wanted, what he had dreamed of.
The wife wouldn't speak. Nobody would speak. Not the family, not the neighbours, and not Georgie Riley.
And the name would not be written down of the man responsible for the injuries inflicted on Georgie Riley. His name and his fate were not spoken of in the pub where thirty-six hours earlier he had slagged off Mister Albert William Packer. The neighbours of his terraced home had seen nothing, heard nothing and knew nothing. The wife, crouched over the hospital bed, had laughed into the face of the detective sergeant, then snarled that he should 'fuck off' and
'get lost'. The victim, Georgie Riley, had he wished to, could not have named his attacker because his tongue had been cut out with a Stanley knife. He could not have written down that name because the four fingers on each of his hands had been taken off with an industrial stone-cutter's circular blade.
He might live, a white-faced physician told the detective sergeant out of the hearing of the wife, for twenty- four hours, and it was possible that he would linger for forty-eight, but he would not survive. The damage was in the trauma and in the loss of blood.
Georgie Riley had lain unconscious in a ditch at the edge of a quiet road leading into Epping Forest for an estimated seven hours before a telephone-kiosk call, when a voice disguised by a handkerchief or clothing over the receiver, had given the location and summoned an ambulance.
'How do you get the creature responsible?' the physician asked.
'I don't know why it was done, and I couldn't on oath say for certain who is responsible,' the detective sergeant said. 'It's about fear. Riley is a medium-scale villain, more time in gaol as an adult than out of it, but he's done something that's caused offence. He wasn't killed outright because the point of the exercise is to create terror and to have that talked about. Men like Riley think themselves big shots, and brave with it. A shoot-out death is acceptable, top-of-the-range funeral and buckets of flowers, that's all fine, and they think they'll go into history… What's happened is that he has been humiliated and made to scream and he'll have wet himself and shat himself and begged for his life. There's nothing noble about the way he's going, a piece of dismembered meat.'
'Won't somebody, eventually, inform?'
'Probably – when the man who ordered it, maybe did it, no longer has power. That's what we live for, when the power dries up. You see, sir, for that sort of man, there is no retirement. There's no day that the birthday comes and he goes down to the post office and draws a pension, or heads off to a decent little villa outside Marbella to live off the interest. They can't walk away and protect what they have and live out their old age. When they're hands-off they're finished, and the information flows. The man who did this is not hands-off, he is up and
